


i wore her jacket for the longest time

by Octeaviea



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gen, but not 'there' yet, i wrote this because i love marina andreski and also to suffer, its pretty gross but not grosser than canon i don't think, marina comes back from the dead and her and julia go on a whirlwind tour of brooklyn, this is not very shippy but pls know that i wrote this under the assumption that they are in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-09-24 08:08:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9712721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Octeaviea/pseuds/Octeaviea
Summary: When Julia brings Marina back from the dead they go to a church, a bar, a club and a pizza parlor; but not in that order, and not for the first time.





	

Marina breaths in a gasp of stale air that tastes like something rotting. The carpet beneath her is rough on the back of her neck. Her mouth tastes like dried blood. A woman's face swims in front of her, pale and framed by dark hair. A mirror? She thinks. No. Julia. Julia! She tries to stand up, but Julia’s hand on her leg holds her down. The air smells like sage. 

Where are they? Not Marina’s apartment. Julia is talking to her but her ears are ringing and she can’t hear. She remembers Reynard twisting Cupcake into something bloody and unrecognizable, Reynard twisting _her_ into something bloody and unrecognizable. Then the world snaps into sudden and sharp focus. She’s dead. She died. She was murdered. Julia is still talking and the ringing is gone. Marina’s head aches. 

“… brought you here. Then I found a spell to bring you back. You wouldn’t believe how complicated it was. I had to kill a _lamb_.”  
Julia looks over to the corner where there is in fact a dead lamb, throat slit, leaking congealing blood on the carpet.  
“Gross.” Marina sounds like she’s been chain smoking and then eating meals of Brillo pads. “Do you have any food?”  
Suddenly Marina is hungrier than she’s ever been in her life.  
“Yeah.” Julia answers. “What do you want?”  
“All the spaghetti you have? And a loaf of bread. Two loaves of bread.”  
Julia raises her eyebrows.  
“Okay.” 

It takes Marina ten minutes to walk to the kitchen. Julia trails behind her, ready to catch her if she wipes out. Her legs tingle and her teeth ache. She sits on a bar stool eating spaghetti by the pound while Julia talks and talks and talks and talks. And Marina is still starving. She licks the tomato sauce out of the bowl and stands up.  
“Do you have any ice cream?” Marina asks, walking towards Julia. She turns to yank the freezer open and Julia moves to step in front of her. She pulls the freezer open and its full of dead lambs, little heads frozen and lolling out of the freezer drawers, blood collecting in pools. Marina’s head swims and she turns slowly back to Julia, the pieces clicking together in her aching head.  
“How many times have you brought me back?” Marina snaps, knuckles cracking as she closes them into fists.  
Julia has the grace, at least to look ashamed of herself. She stares at the carpet and mumbles,  
“Twenty-five.”  
“I’m going to murder you.” Marina announces flatly, and Julia looks almost relived that she isn’t actually trying at the moment, she looks at a set of healing cuts that look like scratch marks on Julia’s collar bone and wonders how may times she has tried to kill her.  
“But first you’re going to buy me a pizza.” 

Julia lends Marina her coat and they walk through the empty streets of Brooklyn, Marina tries to walk into an all night pizza parlor but Julia grabs her arm and leads her away forcefully.  
“We’ve already been there.” she hisses in Marina’s ear, “Their crust is shit.”  
Marina insists they go anyway and Julia sighs like an older sister tasked with babysitting a younger sibling.  
“You always do this.” she sighs.  
Julia orders Marina seven large pepperoni pizzas from a middle-aged waitress. She orders herself a coke.  
Marina plows through the pizzas in twenty minutes flat. The waitress looks at her like this is nothing she hasn’t seen before and hands Julia the bill. She pays in exact change.  
“You girls have a fun night now!” the waitress calls into the hot Brooklyn night after them.  
Marina’s mouth tastes like something dead. She tries not to think about the fact that she was something dead an hour ago.  
“How long do I have?” She asks Julia.  
She looks at her watch.  
“Three hours. I think.”  
Marina sighs, she doesn’t know why, but she expected longer.  
“I need a drink.”  
Julia wordlessly hands her a flask.  
“What is-“  
“Bourbon.”  
Marina drinks, it burns going down more than she remembers.  
“I want to go to a bar.”  
“Okay.”  
Julia takes her to Le Boudoir. The decor is tacky and the drinks our overpriced but Marina is not overly worried about consequences at the moment. She orders six plates of frog legs and a Dauphin. Halfway through her ninth drink she becomes aware of two things. The first is that she is not getting drunk, and the second is that Julia looks very, very tired. She has deep blue circles under her eyes and it doesn’t look like she’s showered in over a week at least. Marina pushes her half full drink towards Julia and Julia takes it wordlessly and downs it in one gulp.  
“Reynard?” Marina asks.  
“Dead.” Julia onsets as she flags down the waiter for another round.  
“You killed him actually, your third time around.”  
Marina raises her eyebrows. “Good.”  
“Why do you keep bringing me back then? You got what you wanted.”  
“Yeah.”  
“Did it help? Watching him die?”  
“Yes. You killed him real slow, fed him his own fingers before you slit his throat.”  
“Good.” She looks down at her own four-fingered hand. It's been carefully, wrapped in a clean white bandage.  
“Still doesn’t explain why you keep bringing me back though.”  
“I killed you. And I feel guilty.”  
“Reynard killed me.”  
“He wouldn’t have if I hadn’t asked for your help. I should have left you out of it.” Julia looks bitterly at the chattering couple next to them.  
“I’m not going to forgive you, if that’s what you want.”  
“Not this time.”  
The waitress brings their drinks and Julia downs hers like a shot. Marina pushes her own drink towards Julia, and Julia drinks it too.  
“Have we been here before?” Marina asks.  
“Lets go dancing.” Julia says by way of answer. 

The night is warm, but Marina can’t stop shivering. She tries to rub blood back into her hands but they stay cold and pale. Having being dead for so long must have permanently fucked up her circulation. Her teeth are chattering and she hates how weak she must look in front of Julia. She tries to cast Chkhartishvili's Enveloping Warmth but the spell dies in her fingertips. Julia looks at her with something like pity.  
“You’re magic gets weaker every time I bring you back.”  
“Then why the fuck do you keep doing it?” Marina hisses through her chattering teeth. Her jaw is starting to hurt. She forces her mouth closed.  
“Maybe I’m sentimental. Maybe I’m actually starting to like you.”  
Marina recognizes her own words from lifetimes ago being thrown back in her face, but she feels so tired, and her shoes are hurting her feet and she’s so cold. 

They arrive at the club and the bouncer asks to see Marina’s ID. Julia curls her fingers around each other and the mans eyes glaze over as they slip past him into the neon dusk of the club.  
“I always get fucking ID’ed. Can’t escape baby face even in death.”  
Julia looks sick for a moment. Marina’s pretty sure its either malnutrition or guilt. Marina doesn’t want whatever’s eating Julia to ruin her last night on earth. She grabs Julia’s hand and pulls her towards the dance floor.  
They dance for half an hour before Marina gets so tired that Julia has to half-carry her out of the club.  
“Take me somewhere I can sit down.”  
“Home?”  
“No. Anywhere else.”  
Julia takes her to a church. Catholic. Empty. Candlelit. Julia and Marina sit down on an oak pew in the front row, the moon shining through stained glass murals of biblical scenes. The blood from the crucifixion panel casts a red light on Julia’s hair. Marina leans her head back against the oak back of the pew, breathing in the smell of incense, heavy in the dusty air. She brings her head back up, turning to look at Julia who still looks pained. 

“Spit it out Jules.”  
Julia looks at her through a curtain of hair.  
“What?”  
“Whatever’s making you make that face.”  
“What face?”  
“You’re all twisted up.” She scoots towards Julia on the bench. “Bless me Marina, for I have sinned or whatever. Come on, go ahead.”  
Marina hates herself for being curious, but she wants to know why Julia keeps bringing her back, why Julia looks worse than she does.  
Julia takes a deep breath, and Marina hears it rattle in her chest.  
“The first time it was almost two days.” Julia says. She does not look at Marina. She stares straight ahead at the stained glass, face blank.  
“I thought I’d done it. Really done it. You left New York. Refused to help with Reynard, told me you were moving to California.”  
“And?” Marina prompts.  
“You called me from a bar in Nevada. Screamed at me for fucking up the spell. By the time I got there you were in a body bag. It was hell to get you out of that morgue. You’ve been cold ever since. I didn’t let you leave after that. The second time you tried to kill me when I wouldn’t let you leave the apartment.” Julia runs her fingers along the scratches on her neck.  
“Sorry.” Marina says shortly. She’s not, really.  
“Don’t be. The third time you killed Reynard for me. Well, not for me. You were so angry. His magic, or whatever it was didn’t work on you. You cut him to pieces before you finally let him die, it took you almost the whole thirty six hours you were alive.”  
“Almost?”  
“Yeah. You drank milkshakes for about three hours after, covered in blood. It was actually kind of amazing. I had to keep going out to get more supplies. You put away like seventeen before you finally dropped.”  
“Dying is thirsty work.”  
“Guess so. After that I started timing you. I figure your time goes down by about two hours every time I bring you back.”  
“What do we do?”  
“Whatever you want.” Julia pulls a cigarette out of a pack she has in her purse and offers Marina one. She waves it away and Julia lights hers with a snap of her fingers before continuing. “You’re hungry a lot. We’ve been to every pizza place in the city, turns out your a brutal Yelp reviewer. Think you’ve ruined a couple of careers in your borrowed time. Sometimes we go drinking, dancing, gambling. Once we just drove west, until you died right in my passenger seat. I don’t always tell you, but I think you know, somehow, that your time is limited.”  
“Do I ever remember?”  
“No.”  
“Why do you do it then? Put yourself through all this just to buy me pizza and then drag my dead body home?”  
“You’re the only one who understands. About Reynard. He didn’t kill me but sometimes I think he should have.” Marina cannot stand the look on Julia's face.  
“You should get help, see a therapist, take up running.” She snatches the cigarette out of Julia’s hand and puts it out on the warm oak of the pew. “Quit smoking. Quit blood magic. I’m not your personal therapy zombie. Also, you look like shit.”  
“Only one of us has been dead for two months.”  
“Could have fooled me.” 

Suddenly the alarm on Julia’s watch rings out irritatingly in the emptiness of the church and Julia sighs gently, almost sounding glad that their conversation is coming to an end, Marina feels her spine go buttery and her heart stutter, Julia reaches her a moment before she slides to the ground and catches her around the waist.  
Marina feels herself sag in Julia’s slender arms. She is tired. Her head hurts, her mouth tastes like blood, she doesn’t remember what it feels like to be warm. Marina’s magic is gone and her wounds wont heel and no matter how much she eats she is hungry for something this world can no longer feed her. Marina would give her magic, her money, her life to go back to three months ago and never knock on Julia’s apartment door and offer to help her kill a god. 'I have no skin in this game.' She had said, but of course she had. She had had Julia, who now looks down at her with big dark eyes that are filled with something like pity. Marina hates her. And pities her. And envies her. And does not want to leave her alone in an empty church with a dead girl in her arms. But Marina has always been selfish, so she grabs Julia’s thin wrist as tightly as she can and says coldly.  
“Do me a favor at let me die for real this time.”  
Julia looks at her. Almost fondly, she brushes back a loose strand of dark hair away from her forehead.  
“You always say that.” She says gently. 

Marina wakes up.


End file.
